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The ethics of refugee policy

This is the conclusion of my master's dissertation on the ethics of refugee policy. By the time I wrote it I was bored of philosophy, so it's pretty readable. If you read it and think you're interested in some of the chapters, send me an email - though they are written as academic political philosophy, even if I'll flatter myself by saying they're more understandable than most philosophy.

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This thesis has explored a number of
questions in the ethics of refugee policy, a philosophically neglected and
politically urgent part of the broader literature on immigration in political
theory. Part I examined who has claims to refugeehood and what those claims
entail, and Part II focused on the distribution of responsibilities within the
global refugee system. I want to end this thesis by summarising the conclusions
reached and emphasising their significance.

Our starting point, as in most
discussions of refugees in political philosophy, was the definition of
‘refugee’. Ultimately, however, Chapter 1 arrived at the conclusion that the
refugee label is of no essential interest to political philosophers. Attempts
to find a non-normative definition of refugeehood run aground because our
understanding of a refugee is essentially someone owed a certain kind of
treatment. And defining a refugee in purely normative terms delivers no
philosophical advantage, while creating the risk of inappropriately siloing
arguments with much broader application than just to refugees.

Chapter 2 illustrated one way this
might be the case, arguing that the universally-recognised constraint of
non-refoulement has nothing in particular to do with refugees at all.
Non-refoulement is a binding duty owed to everyone, not flowing from states’
responsibilities to help refugees, and it renders impermissible most of the
non-arrival measures like strict visa regimes with which rich states control
their borders. Chapter 3 turned to the question of who has positive claims to
settlement, and identified a much broader group than recognised by existing
legal definitions, or even most theorists. The need to respond to migrants’
plight in situationally appropriate ways and respect their preferences means
that there is sometimes a duty to give residence even to people who could be
helped in other ways.

With this account of who has claims to
settlement in hand, Part II explored how the responsibility to meet these
claims should be parcelled out between states. Chapter 4 argued that although
this allocation is governed by overarching principles of justice, which I’ve
remained neutral on here, most plausible principles point in the same
direction. Responsibility for refugee flows, national wealth, the general
immigration intake are clearly relevant to determining a state’s fair share;
cultural affinity between the home population and arriving refugees may be; a
society’s history of multiculturalism is not. In Chapter 5, I argued that when
some states do not do their fair share of the burden of discharging duties to
refugees, others have a duty to take up the slack. Objections to such a duty on
the basis of its unfairness are unsuccessful; the obligation may not even be
collective in the sense necessary for fairness arguments to have much weight.
Each state must act, therefore, until it reaches the absolute limits of the
costs it can be expected to bear in protecting human rights.

This final question arises because some
states will inevitably do less than their share. No less inevitably, very few
states will comply with this secondary duty to take up the slack. Perhaps even
more than in other areas of political philosophy, writing about states’ duties
to refugees means pointing out flagrant injustices that are exceedingly
unlikely to be rectified. Most states are insulated, by luck or policy, from
the consequences of refugees’ rights going unprotected. There is little
prospect for the kind of alignment of self-interest and morality which is
necessary to secure governments’ compliance with the demands of justice that
I’ve argued for here.[i]
It’s nonetheless philosophically valuable to be clear about the answers to
these questions.

We have also seen some arguments with
philosophical implications beyond the ethics of refugee policy, of which I’ll
highlight three. First, Chapter 2’s conclusions are very significant to the
broader political philosophy of immigration. If nobody may be deported to a country where their human rights would
not be secure, or prevented by more innocuous-seeming measures like visa
requirements from leaving such countries, then the tools with which states may
control their borders are seriously constrained. I’ve assumed throughout this
thesis that justice does not require open borders; this discussion indicated
how, even granting this, there are powerful objections to border controls which
sharply limit the scope of permissible attempts to restrict immigration.

Secondly, Chapter 3’s conclusions about
disjunctive duties – that at least some claimant preferences constrain what can
be done to fulfil a claim, and that the broader moral effects of a choice are
strongly relevant – apply in any domain, potentially going far beyond
immigration and refugees. Finally, issues about collective responsibilities and
non-compliance arise in many spheres. Objections to the duty to take up the
slack, I argued, have dubious intuitive foundations and rely on an
inappropriate notion of collective responsibility. These are contentions which
can be translated to equivalent debates, about carbon emissions or foreign aid,
and which should incline us towards a more expansive view of states’
obligations in these spheres.

The principal motivation for this work,
however, is the importance of getting a clear-eyed, theoretically satisfactory
account of what is owed to refugees. The results are very demanding, but the
fact that governments will not in the near future recognise these obligations should
not discourage us from identifying them.

“Some will be impatient with this
approach, dismissing it as utopian. But critiques of deeply entrenched
injustices are always utopian. That is what it means to say the injustices are
deeply entrenched.”[ii]

Recent months and years – including the
months during which this thesis was written – have seen widespread retrenchment
of what wealthy nations are willing to do for the world’s refugees. That is a
tragic fact we must recognise in formulating political responses to their
plight. But not everything is strategy. Uncompromising – even if ‘utopian’ –
political philosophy helps ensure that we do not lower our standards in
response to immorality, and that we keep our eyes firmly fixed on what the
ideals of justice require.